Switching to a different weather service (Read 233 times)

The weather widget on you summary page uses WeatherBug's free weather service. They announced several months ago that they're terminating this service on March 31, which is today. They created a new fee based service as a replacement. I spent the past week looking for a new free weather service. I found a couple although I'm not completely sure of their accuracy and reliability. I also implemented a more modular design for handling weather data so that switching services is relatively plug and play, so to speak.

I am planning to deploy the change tonight. There might be a brief slow down or outage because the existing weather data needs to be converted to the new format. The new weather code is not compatible with the existing one so you'll have to reenter the location.

Since I'm in this area of the code, I'm working on pre-populating GPS imported workouts with weather data since the location and time are known. This feature is not complete yet so it won't be in tonight's update, but it should be available by the weekend. The only catch is that it is available to users with ad-free subscriptions because weather services charge a fee for historical weather lookups.

Thanks Eric! I don't use the weather widget. But are you saying when you make this change, if we are a subscriber, all our historical workouts based on GPS upload will automatically include weather data? (Or just all moving forward?) That will be amazing.

The deployment is complete. There were several bugs encountered by users and they are fixed. After I complete the auto populating of the weather, I can wrap up by current project so I can move onto more exciting features.

Thanks Eric! I don't use the weather widget. But are you saying when you make this change, if we are a subscriber, all our historical workouts based on GPS upload will automatically include weather data? (Or just all moving forward?) That will be amazing.

For now, it'll be just new workouts. It'll be a separate project to fill old workouts with weather data, especially since given the number of workouts, it will take days to do, even if the server can process multiple workouts per second. It'll probably be something I need to work out with the weather data provider. I'm sure they don't want RA pounding their servers for days.

I was not able to complete the auto weather population feature this weekend, partly due to the time needed to fix the bugs introduced in the update, and to complete the code needed by sumdeus's iPhone app. Much of it is done. All I got left is displaying the weather data on the workout page. There might be additional feature creeps if I decide to clean up the view workout page because it's one of the oldest pages on RA.